Boards With Women Members Do Better, Studies Find

BOSTON ( MainStreet) Having women on its board is a good way for a business to safeguard itself against financial losses and takeovers. At least, that's the conclusion of a study by the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business.

The study found that the more women there are on a corporate board, the less that corporation pays for each acquisition an average of 15.4% with each female director added. Each additional female board member also reduces the number of that company's attempted takeover bids by 7.6%.

"Female board members play a significant role in mitigating the empire-building tendency of CEOs through the acquisition of other companies." said Sauder finance professor and co-author of the study Kai Li in a press release. "On average, merger and acquisition transactions don't create shareholder value, so women are having a real impact in protecting shareholder investment and overall firm performance."

According to the researchers, the results suggest women are more cautious about and therefore less likely to pursue risky transactions; they need to be guaranteed a higher return on investment before they will partake in a deal.

"Our findings show that the prudence exhibited by women directors in negotiating mergers and acquisitions has had a substantial positive effect on maintaining firm value," Li said in the press release. "This finding adds fire and force to recent calls to mandate a minimum number of women on the boards of publicly traded companies."

The study's findings, in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Finance, were the result of an analysis of a large sample of acquisition bids made by S&P 1500 companies in the United States between 1997 and 2009. To determine the cost of the acquisitions, researchers examined the difference between the final price offered for the company and the stock price of the targeted firm before the deal was signed otherwise known as the "bid premium." The bid premium was correlated to the number of women directors on the various boards.

The Sauder study adds to an already ripe discussion on the need for more women board members.

The Washington D.C.-based Committee for Economic Development released its own report last year criticizing the stagnation of female representation in U.S. boardrooms. The report lamented that women make up only between 11% to 12% of corporate board members the same as a decade ago.

"Ignoring half the population in places of corporate governance forces companies to play with only half of the deck and miss out on high-potential board members," Forbes contributor Kate Taylor wrote last year. "Women at the top allow greater representation and draw for women in the workforce and better outcomes for their companies."

The Sauder study is also not the only one supporting the theory that companies with more women on their boards and in other high positions are more successful than less gender-diverse counterparts.

A study by Catalyst released in 2007 found that Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of female board members outperformed significantly companies with low ratios of women: by at least 53% on equity, 42% on return of sales and 66% on return on invested capital. When updating its research in 2011, Catalyst found a 26% difference in return on invested capital between companies that had 19% or more women on their boards compared with those that had none.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co.'s Organizational Health Index also indicated that companies with three or more women in top positions scored higher than other companies and in turn generally exhibited superior financial performances compared with those lacking strong female representation in high positions, including on the board of directors.

Some critics have called the findings overstated.

"The economic case for gender quotas is ... shakier than its advocates seem to realize," wrote

Christina Hoff Sommers on the McKinsey and Catalyst studies for The Atlantic back in May. "Neither study has established causation: More female directors could be a consequence, rather than a cause, of business success."

In considering such criticism, Li noted, "This is always the challenge in our empirical analysis, whether we identify a causal relation that is, the presence of female directors leads to better deal outcome or simply association."

But Li says most biological and sociological evidence supports that women are less overconfident than men, which can be an asset that plays a direct role in a company avoiding a potentially problematic merger or business deal.

"Women view the future cash flows associated with a takeover target to be lower than men see it," Li said. "Women also expect the future is more uncertain, so they call for higher discount rates for those future lower cash flows. Both effects together make women directors view takeover target firms to be less attractive, prompting women directors to recommend making fewer deals and, conditional on making a deal, paying a lower premium."